Homestead Bartering

It sounds like a bit of a crazy hippie idea, but bartering is an important part of homesteading.

Cash is sometimes hard to come by  because many homesteading families like ours choose to live on less income. In a city, everyone doesn't have the space to make everything a homestead can produce so we share. In lieu of real money, I can trade the use of tools, home canned goods, produce in season, writing and social media services and private cooking classes for things I want.

How We Barter

Sometimes I send out a call for things we need via Twitter, Facebook, or friends. Other times, I notice people with a need and make an offer.

We negotiate a little bit to be sure that everyone feels that they are entering into a fair deal. Barter is casual for me; thus far I've only relied on personal communication as a contract.

I work hard to hold up my end of the deal and then some. I always try to exceed the expectations of people I trade with because I hope to maintain good relationships.

What We Barter

The cider press is something I frequently offer to others. I've been paid in good company, excess cider, and laundry detergent.

I will almost always work for food. Occasionally I trade blog post reviews for food samples (always disclosed, of course). Last spring, I staffed the Swainway booth at the Clintonville Farmer's Market for a flat of someday-food: produce seedlings. I trained on Section 8 Yakitorium's grill in exchange for boats of delicious Japanese food.

I traded homegrown and homemade food for the new Hounds in the Kitchen logo design by Allie Lehman. Cliff Adams of LinKen Web Development is assisting with the design of the new site in exchange for cooking lessons. I can't wait to show you all this bartered work!

Wanna barter?

Make me an offer! Trading is more personal and fun than cash retail.

PS. Happy Martin Luther King Day. Today we'll do our usual creating, living and eating with Dr. King's message of peace and tolerance in mind. We'll read our copy of My Brother Martin and listen to this, my favorite protest song for kids:

Hosting a Dinner Party? Tips for Low-Stress Entertaining

I love to host dinner parties. This time of year, many people are entertaining family and friends in their homes. Here are my a few tips for lessening the stress of hosting:

1) Set the table first. It always puts me in the mood and is one task that is perfect to complete far in advance of the dinner hour. If children are around, I always ask them to help with setting out napkins and silverware.

2) Place water glasses and a pitcher on the table. This prevents thirsty folk from occupying the kitchen and leaves the hostess ready to serve other drinks.

3) Clean and put away all possible dishes before guests arrive. If you have an empty dishwasher or sink, plates can be whisked out of sight during courses and clean up later will run smoothly.

4) Establish 'stations' in your kitchen and dining area. You may need a drink station, buffet line, dessert station, or serving station. Be mindful of what utensils might be necessary at each station and lay out hot pads, silverware, drink glasses, etc.

5) Consider your menu carefully to please guests and make life easy on yourself. I err towards the side of simplicity and quality, usually serving one or two hot dishes and several prepared-ahead courses like salad or dessert.

6) Prepare (or ask someone to bring) an appetizer to occupy guests as they mingle before the meal. Think simple, fresh vegetables, cheese, or charcuterie that can be eaten without utensils or serving dishes. A make-ahead finger food tray frees the hostess to finish preparing the rest of the meal.

7) Assign roles if you are sharing host duties. Alex and I usually have a pow-wow an hour or so before the event to decide who will greet guests and who will staff the kitchen.

8 ) Once the guests arrive, take a deep breath and enjoy yourself! Plans do not always go as you wish but so long as you keep the spirit of the party alive, guests will never know if little details go awry.

How do you do to prepare for a dinner party?

PS. These pictures came from the 'It Couldn't Be...' dinner party we threw in July. I needed a reminder today that someday it will be light and bright again.

Added to Simple Lives Thursday #74.

Imperfections {Friday Five}

Thanks to a generous friend who gave me a huge stash of canning supplies, I have a new favorite jar. (What? You don't have favorite jars? Crazy!)

This jar is blue, which is fun, and obviously old. It nearly matches four others I have of the same size and brand. This one is special for a small but significant manufacturing flaw.

See what it says under the Ball name? P rfect Mason. The 'e' is missing, clearly a misprint.  Eagle eyes will notice the air inclusions that make the jar useless for canning. My new favorite jar is, therefore, an imperfect mason.

I love this jar because it reminds me that life is imperfect. I am imperfect.

Unlike a poorly pressed jar that can only ever hold flowers, we humans can work on our imperfections. We can never achieve perfection but we can be constantly inching towards our better selves. I am intentionally working to improve in these ways:

1) Be Fully Present - Between the pulls of social networks, animals, phone calls, the kid, neighborhood noise, and a natural tendency to wander, I default to a state of distraction. There are half-started projects all over the house. I am consciously trying to overcome distraction and stay fully focused on a single idea until completion - be it a conversation, a preserving project, or something I'm doing with Lil. It feels good to say no to the interruptions and truly be present.

2) Eat Lunch - My stupidest imperfection is that nearly every midday I think I can have a light and healthy meal. It doesn't work for me and by 4 pm I am a grouchy hungry person. When I eat a full meal with a good dose of protein, I'm not a grump in the afternoon. Solution seems simple, right?

3) Stay with the Hard Stuff - When something is difficult for me or conflict arises, I tend to drop it and run. This isn't healthy for me. I need to speak my true feelings and not just hide until difficulties pass.

4) Be OK with Mistakes - I tell Lillian constantly that "it's ok to make mistakes". But I don't actually cut myself a break when I make them. Whether I spill, can't get the perfect photograph, or lose something, I need to take a breath and forgive myself for these little screw-ups. Modeling that little mistakes are ok is as important as saying the words.

5) Be Satisfied - My tendency is to always be striving for something greater. It's a good quality to have in that I am willing to work hard, but I never relax and enjoy what I have. I have a lot to be satisfied about - a loving husband, healthy kid, warm home, etc. Every day I try to be thankful for the current moment without looking ahead. But a tiny part of me always wants more - I think I will be working on this imperfection my whole life.

What imperfections are you working on now?

PS. Though the idea of a Defense Department is rife with ethical imperfections, I remain thankful for those who serve(d) in the military. I shared Vonnegut's thoughts on Veteran's Day last year and I still think his words are fantastic.

Haunted Halloween Candy

The season of Excessive Consumption is upon us, preceded by the month of Meaningful Worries and followed up with the weeks of Staggering Stuff. Usually my anxiety about winter holidays holds off until mid November but this year, Halloween candy is haunting me.

Off the bat (Halloween pun?), let me be clear that I believe a day or two of sugary indulgence is not the end of the world for my girl Lil. We serve healthy food on a regular basis and sweets really are 'sometimes foods' in our home.

Besides, we temper the candy feasting with creative and educational pursuits like costume design and creation, making decorations, picking and carving pumpkins, and roasting seeds. There's a lot more to Halloween than one night of trick-or-treating.

Meaningful Worries

However, I am increasingly concerned not only with the locality and quality of ingredients but the treatment of labor used to plant, harvest and process foodstuffs. Sugar and chocolate, components of many candies, are conventionally made with notorious disregard for farm workers.

I choose to purchase fair trade labeled coffee, baking chocolate, sugar, and spices for our home kitchen. Though no food label is perfect, the fair trade standards give me some security that my family is not benefiting from the destruction of another.

If I were to hand out a fair trade chocolate bar (just one mini size piece) to the hundreds of beggars who visit our neighborhood, I could easily spend over $100. Lil is tired of the organic lollipops we usually give away, wanting something more mainstream. She has rejected my non-candy suggestions. Our compromise this year may be food-dye laden, but at least made in North America, Smarties.

Staggering Stuff

Moving on to the next ghoul: the candy haul Lil brings home. In previous years, the excitement of costumes and decorations at a few houses was enough to thrill her. I can see in her glistening-like-a-candy-wrapper eyes that this year, she expects to fill her basket.

Like I said before, I'm not afraid of an evening's sugar buzz. Between her distaste for anything containing nuts or having too chewy or sticky a texture, she dismisses much of her beggar's night haul without prompting.

But what do we do with the rejected haul? Alex and I certainly don't want to consume all the additives in common candies. Plus, when I eat sweets, I feel a sugar high and dip faster than a bat darts through our alley.

We could pass the excess candy off to Alex's office, but he frequently complains about the high level of obesity in his workplace. Donating to a food pantry makes me feel equally guilty. No one should eat this stuff.

Do we throw it away? That seems like a senseless waste of all the resources necessary to grow, process, and package the junk.

I have no solutions to the creepy side of Halloween candy. Are you haunted too? To show that I'm not a complete treatophobe, take a listen to one of my favorite songs of late, Sweet Tooth performed by David Rawlings and Gillian Welch.

Wishes {Friday Five}

This week, I put myself out there and pitched some ideas to sponsors and media. As much as I like attention, I hate asking for help, so sending requests is hard for me. Yet I know that no one will be able to support my vision if I do not ask. In the event that someone reading this is able to help manifest my dreams, I boldly list them here today. I wish...

1) ...to move to a home with a big kitchen and mudroom on 2-4 rural acres in or very near Columbus. Space to entertain or build an education barn is a plus. I have so many plans for a sustainable urban homestead!

2) ...something comes of my idea to build a home food preserving tool lending library. I applied for a $1000 grant from Awesome Food for this project. If you like the idea of a pool of tools to share amongst cooking and preserving geeks, I would love to hear your thoughts about other funding sources.

3) ...for more chickens and bees and maybe meat rabbits. Space is holding me back, see #1.

4) ...my face would stop hurting already. In the last six weeks I have wrecked my digestive system with two different antibiotics and yet a sinus infection persists. I'll get another stamp on my ENT frequent patient card this afternoon.

5) ...that you all know how grateful I am. I love sharing photos, stories, and advice on this blog. Even better are the responses I hear when people try a recipe or start a garden or visit a market because of something they saw here. Thank you for reading.

Bathroom Update {Before & After}

Two weekends ago, I decided to tackle a long overdue bullet point on the 'house to-do' list: the first floor bathroom. This teeny tiny bathroom was decorated by the former owners with butterscotch textured paint and big black shelves. The dark colors made the loo seem even smaller than it was. The toilet paper holder had only one attachment point and was forever falling out of the drywall.

Oh, and Lil discovered she could use her fingernails to 'draw' on the textured walls.

Over three days, I repainted in light beige, replaced the toilet paper and towel holder, and switched out the light-sucking shelves with a simple etagere. The paint was left over from another room in the house. The accessories cost a total of $60.

Ah. Much better. Why did it take me four years to update this bathroom?

PS. Lots of great events are coming up - Holiday Food Gifts on Sunday at Franklin Park, Will Allen next weekend, Tomato Preserving Tuesday the 19th. Reserve your space soon!

How to Hang Laundry Like a Pro

Ok, so I am actually (and thankfully) NOT a professional laundress. No one pays me for the service of drying clothes outside, just as I collect no paycheck for growing fruits and vegetables, cooking, canning, homeschooling, or writing this here blog. I do, however, save $1.05 in electric costs per load of laundry NOT dried in the dryer.

(Want to know how much your dryer costs per load? Look for the amps and volts on the label inside the dryer. Multiply these to get watts. Then, multiply by the average load time in hours and divide by 1000 to get kilowatt hours. Multiply that by what you pay per kwH to the electric company and you'll have the electric cost per load. In other words:

amps x volts x drying time in hours / 1000 x cost per kwH = cost per load)

Each load of laundry in the clothes dryer also saves wear and tear on the machine and unknown environmental costs.

I believe there are aesthetic benefits to hanging out laundry. The clothes smell simply clean and fresh when they are done. The sun naturally bleaches whites. Hung properly, line-dried laundry is wrinkle-free. The few minutes it takes to hang and fold clothes is a tiny bit of an upper body workout.

And could clothes waving in the wind be more charming?

To make hanging laundry a simple addition to your routine, invest in a few quality tools and follow these techniques:

• Plastic clothespins trump wooden. We tried both and the plastic has outlasted wooden by a long shot. We have the PRESSA clothespins from IKEA; for $1.99, the price can't be beat.
• Find a high quality clothesline. Yes, you can hang laundry on anything, but a line between two pulleys or a spinning dryer works most efficiently. In some small spaces, a retractable line would be useful. Local hardware stores may carry clotheline options. Lehmans carries a wide variety online.
• Hang shirts upside down with clips on the bottom hem at the side seams. This leaves the fewest marks.
• Hang thick items, like towels, in a single layer.
• Remove clothes as soon as they are dry. Occasionally song birds like to roost on our line and, well, no one likes bird poop on their 'clean' laundry.
• Get over your fear of neighbors viewing your laundry. Everyone wears underwear and what you hang on the line is at least clean!
• You can plan on a load taking 2-3 hours to dry in the summer.

Do you line dry? Share your tips and tricks below.

Added to Simple Lives Thursday 50.

Fathers

I am surrounded by fantastic fathers. These inspiring, caring men enrich the lives of Lil and I:

l to r - Mitch, my dad; Mike, my uncle; Tom, Alex's dad, click to enlarge

My dad, Mitch, is patient and funny. He encouraged his four girls to be strong curious women, enduring the resulting loud and confusing dinner conversations. I clearly picked up Dad's love for the outdoors, good food and strong drink. Speaking of eats, allow me to add home cook extraordinaire Uncle Mike to this list. While not a biological father, Mike opens his heart and home my cousins and myself with as much generosity and kindness as a father would. He's a fun-loving man, always creating something, always ready for an adventure.

Tom, Alex's father, inspires me to think and question. He has been a father figure in my life as long as I can remember. I admire that he is a life long learner, fearless traveler, and hard-working artist. Most of all I thank Tom for his part in raising his son, my partner.

Because of the men I grew up with, I expected that Alex would be an engaged dad. He is. Alex includes Lil in his interests, patiently answers her questions about history and language, and is a great friend to her friends. He is a curious cook, keeping us in bread and sausage, and always pushing us to try new things.

I am painfully aware that many, if not most, women never experience such strong and loving fathers. I am thankful for Dad, Uncle Mike, Tom, and Alex every day, but especially this day. Happy Father's Day, y'all!